Yes, we know, dear readers, we have been neglectful of the blog. We could make a bunch of excuses about work, but you’d know we were just lying in order to cover up our habit of leaving the office early to drink fine wine and smoke fine cigars. So, none of that! (And our thanks to the one reader who wrote to complain about not receiving her fix of sarcasm; she’ll remain nameless in order that her friends not make fun of her for being a reader.)

On, then, with the sarcasm!

• As you news junkies no doubt know by now, District Court Judge Douglas Herndon ordered Clark County Recorder Frances Deane removed from office on grounds of malfeasance today. Herndon, applying a strict standard of evidence, found it was clear Deane had taken bribes proffered by businessman trying to buy lucrative county records that Deane oversaw.

Our reaction: About time! It’s been clear Deane has been guilty for a long time, a fact obvious to everybody in town save for Deane and Justice of the Peace Karen Bennett-Haron, who has been mulling since July what it took Herndon only a few days to conclude: Deane did it.

Perhaps now Bennett-Haron will bind Deane over for her criminal trial in District Court? Or does she really need until Sept. 14 to make up her mind, as she’s previously said? Hey, perhaps District Attorney David Roger, having won a malfeasance case, can assign his prosecutors to investigate a nonfeasance case?

At least now, taxpayers won’t have to keep paying Deane’s salary. Clark County officials immediately sent out a news release announcing that Assistant Recorder Charles Harvey would be appointed to fill Deane’s post until an interim recorder can be appointed until voters choose a permanent successor in the November election. (Harvey ran, but lost, the Republican primary for the job.)

• The cries still ring forth for state Sen. Dina Titus to meet with vanquished Democratic gubernatorial primary foe Henderson Mayor Jim Gibson to secure Gibson’s endorsement. And those calls come from no less authority than … a Republican operative!

That’s right, the Review-Journal quotes - at length - Republican strategist Steve Wark, saying Titus should do all in her power to mend fences with Gibson, whom she beat like an LAPD suspect. More on that in a second. But first, we must ask ourselves a question: Why would Democrats take the advice of a Republican, especially one who doesn’t have all that many wins to his credit?

Does anybody think Wark wants Titus to win, or that he’d give her good advice? Or is it more reasonable to assume that Wark wants a Republican to win, and thus would probably give Titus bad advice, in the hopes she screws up her campaign?

Hmmmmm….

Anyway, let’s see if we can learn anything from Wark’s remarks, shall we?

– “If I were Dina Titus, I would be doing everything possible to make sure I don’t bleed Democrats. Two weeks is a very long time within the context of a very short general election cycle. Every day that goes by that they haven’t been able to pull that off is strategically significant.” - Wark

– “There were personal things said and very strong allegiances on both sides. From a practical aspect … she needs to go back to his fan base.” - Wark, again

Really? Why? A person inclined to support Gibson wouldn’t be very inclined to support Titus, would they, since the candidates were so different? And that wouldn’t really change with a Gibson endorsement of Titus, which hard-core Gibson supporters would likely dismiss as a ham-handed act of enforced party loyalty. (Nobody could ever truly believe that Gibson supports Titus, after all the things they said about each other, could they? Of course not.)

In the end, loyal Democrats will stick with Titus, and moderate and Republican Gibson fans will go elsewhere. (She’s not going to “bleed” true-blue Democrats; she’s had them all along.) An endorsement from Gibson isn’t going to change that.

But that’s not even the worst of it: Why would Titus, having essentially accused Gibson of taking money in exchange for official acts - what she calls “pay to play” and what federal authorities in certain cases call “bribery” - even want Gibson’s endorsement?

And consider this: Gibson doesn’t want to endorse Titus, either! He’s said he’s willing to “sit down with her,” which is a conversation we’d love to hear, full of Gibson whining about how Titus portrayed him during the primary. He wants her to beg, and she shouldn’t. If he doesn’t want to give her his backing - the way Republican Assemblywoman Sharron Angle eventually did to 2nd Congressional District nominee Dean Heller, which is to say, automatically and without conditions - then she should simply move on.

• Speaking of Angle, what a wuss! After pledging to fight for voters who were allegedly disenfranchised in the Aug. 15 primary, she gave up after the first adverse court ruling! If, as she claimed, her legal fight was about the sacred right to vote, shouldn’t she have fought all the way? And if, as others have claimed, it was a selfish, desperate bid to hang on to some tiny bit of relevance, shouldn’t she have not filed a lawsuit in the first place?

But whatever: She gave up, she’s out, and she endorsed Heller without prompting (or news stories wondering if she would or wouldn’t). Let’s give her one final quote before sending her to the dustbin of Nevada political history, shall we?

“We were able to bring the integrity of elections and the value of every single vote to such a prominence that I think we can be assured, I hope we can be assured, that we will have an honest, fair election in November and that we will never see a repeat of what happened in the primary election of Aug. 15,” Angle said.

Please! You haven’t done jack to fix the system! All you did was go out on a bitter note, failing to grasp one easy-to-understand principle: If you lose an election by 421 votes, and you claim voters were prevented from voting by late-opening polling places or malfunctioning machines, you need to prove at least 211 of those votes were going to go to you! Angle failed to do that, and thus lost.

• Quotable: “When a politician is accused of something, people automatically think they’re guilty. No matter what happens, I’m sure there will be people who will always believe I did something wrong. I want my kids and my grandkids to be able to say, ‘Well, she was cleared of that.’” - Former Clark County Commissioner Mary Kincaid-Chauncey, on filing an appeal of her conviction on corruption charges in the G-sting case.

We’d like to gently remind Ms. Kincaid-Chauncey that we don’t think she did something wrong because she’s a politician. We think she did something wrong because she accepted money from a Strip club owner in exchange for performing official acts for him in office. That’s called corruption, and people don’t just think it’s wrong. It is wrong.

• We can’t be 100 percent sure, of course, but did anybody else get the impression that Review-Journal Editor Tom Mitchell was challenging Las Vegas Sun Editor Brian Greenspun to a duel in Mitchell’s Sunday column? And what was up with the hat?

• It’s truly amazing to see somebody who was so right about the debacle that the Iraq war would become backing away from their foresight. (Remember that word; it will become important later on.)

Of all people, Gulf War I veteran, congressman and candidate for governor Jim Gibbons called it, according to a piece by J. Patrick Coolican in the Las Vegas Sun. “You don’t want to invite yourself into an internal struggle of an Arab nation that has gone on for centuries,” Gibbons said back in 1996, when Bill Clinton was present. Also in the 90s, he said if Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was deposed, a power vacuum would be filled by Syria or Iran.

Check out Congressman Nostradamus!

But instead of saying “I told you so,” or even using his see-the-future credibility to suggest a new course in Iraq, Gibbons is simply backing up the Bush administration, whose officials essentially ignored his advice and screwed the pooch like they were Jenna Jameson anyway.

“With 20-20 hindsight, we can say more troops should have been put in place. We can all second-guess everything in our lives,” Gibbons told the Sun.

That’s just the point: Gibbons didn’t have hindsight. He had foresight. And so did some other people, who warned Bush not to invade. But Bush ignored them, the way he first ignored Gibbons’ idea to create a Department of Homeland Security. (On that one at least, Bush came around.)

Oh, and with 20-20 hindsight, foresight or whatever, the question isn’t whether we should have put more troops into the fight; it’s whether it was necessary to have gone at all. And the answer to that question, as Gibbons well knows, is no.

If only he’d say so.

• Quotable: “If you’re not electing Christians, then in essence you are going to legislate sin.” - U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris, who is running for U.S. Senate from Florida and appears poised to win the Republican nomination, despite the fact that Sunshine State Republican leaders have turned against her and tried to recruit other candidates.

Gee, we can’t imagine why the GOP would be embarrassed by Harris.

Oh, by the way, when Harris helped steal the 2000 election from then-Vice President Al Gore? Yeah, that was a sin.

• And finally today, the Los Angeles Times caught up with Nevada Supreme Court Justice Bob Rose’s plan to reform the state’s judiciary, which was sparked by a Times series published in June. You can read it here.